Feature Article

Freshwater appropriation can have vast impacts, depending on management and scale of water use. Since 2000, foreign investors have contracted an area the size of the United Kingdom in Africa, leading to increased pressure on water resources. Here we couple site-specific water demand for the crops planted there to the efficiency of different irrigation systems, while relating these estimates to local water availability.

Within the framework of air quality studies at the megacity scale, highly time-resolved volatile organic compound (C2–C8) measurements were performed in downtown Paris (urban background sites) from January to November 2010. This unique dataset included non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHCs) and aromatic/oxygenated species (OVOCs) measured by a GC-FID (gas chromatograph with a flame ionization detector) and a PTR-MS (proton transfer reaction – mass spectrometer), respectively.

We investigate the effect of domestic politics on international environmental policy by incorporating into a classic stage game of coalition formation the phenomenon of lobbying by special-interest groups. In doing so, we contribute to the theory of international environmental agreements, which has overwhelmingly assumed that governments make decisions based on a single set of public-interest motivations. Our results suggest that lobbying on emissions may affect the size of the stable coalition in counterintuitive ways.

A spurt in the cancellation of public-private partnership projects in recent times can be attributted to macroeconomic crises, inherent problems in the water sector projects, and foreign sponsorship of these projects. Since giving the renegotiation relief to many of these projects seems to be problematic, cancellation is probably the only way for the government to elicit more realistic bidding from the private sector.

The article comments on the Maharashtra government's Department of Water Resources Draft Godavari Basin Water Resources Plan from the perspective of the Vidarbha region.

Malnutrition deaths in Maharashtra's tribal belt expose indifference of successive governments. (Editorial)

Climate change will affect hydrologic patterns in the Middle East over future decades. Already limited water resources will become further limited, creating further challenges for water allocation protocols. While there is no integrated climate/water allocation framework to develop sophisticated dynamic allocation patterns, determining the economic value of water in various markets is one way to optimize water allocation.

Pretreatment of feed water to improve membrane flux during filtration of agriculture field water containing substituted phenyl urea pesticide diuron has been reported. Laboratory-made reverse osmosis membrane was used for filtration. Preliminary experiments were conducted with model solution containing natural organic matter extracted from commercial humic acids, divalent ions Ca2+, Mg2+. Membrane fouling was characterized by pure water flux decline, change in membrane hydrophilicity and infrared spectroscopy. Natural organic matter present in field water causes severe membrane fouling.

Stromatolite fossils formed around 3,700 million years ago in what is now Greenland predate the previous oldest fossil evidence for life on Earth by more than 200 million years.

Reconstructing the past variability of Arctic sea ice provides an essential context for recent multi-year sea ice decline, although few quantitative reconstructions cover the Holocene period prior to the earliest historical records 1,200 years ago. Photochemical recycling of bromine is observed over first-year, or seasonal, sea ice in so-called “bromine explosions” and we employ a 1-D chemistry transport model to quantify processes of bromine enrichment over first-year sea ice and depositional transport over multi-year sea ice and land ice.